Next-Gen CASB Blog

AirPods and CASBs

I was reading an article on Apple’s AirPods, when this line caught my attention:

“... most companies focus on making a product that's appealing to buy, whereas Apple's not-so-secret magic has been in devising ones that are appealing to use.”

What do AirPods and Bitglass have in common?

AirPods made it very easy for users to use wireless headphones with iPhones. Apple achieved this by designing a new chip that vastly improved bluetooth pairing and reliability, solving the problem that plagued most other bluetooth devices. The focus here was on designing complex technologies in the background that made the product simple and appealing to use.

Bitglass has focused on making a CASB that can be deployed by customers in an afternoon. We have solved complex technical challenges in the background like the AJAX VM and SAML Proxy which allow an administrator to change a single configuration in a cloud application and deploy a CASB to all their users.

Our competitors have built solutions that on the surface promise lots of functionality, but have pushed all the complexity to users and are un-deployable due to their inability to interface with existing security technologies like Secure Web Gateways and requirements to push agents on all devices. They have focused on making things appealing to buy, forgetting that in the long run the only products that succeed are the ones that are appealing to use.